It's most peculiar. Shouldn't someone remind Herbert that the Home Office has pushed through police and crime commissioners, a reform breathtaking in its lack of evidence and forethought? If Dame Helen Ghosh and her colleagues were naysaying, they didn't do much of a job in stoppingHerbert and Theresa May driving the department over the cliff.

On the same Today programme on Monday, David Cameron congratulated himself on heading a radical and disruptive government. Well he might: the changes to the NHS and schooling, the contracting out of probation amount to profound change. Chris Grayling, Michael Gove and Andrew Lansley haven't complained about obstruction; the ramshackle nature of each reform suggests the civil service pretty much said: "yes, minister".

The peculiarity goes deeper. Taking what Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin said in opposition and have affirmed since, this government actively wants to destroy government: to downsize and disrespect the state to a point where it can't be built back up. That's their ideological direction. You might infer from that they would be indifferent, even hostile, to making that (shrunken) state more effective. Yet the logic of the criticism we're hearing is about more (Herbert's phrase) "good people".

Now he may simply mean "good", as in sympathetic to the Cameron project, but the voices he collected for his BBC package – such as Lord Michael Bichard's – were saying something else. They want a state that works.

Old hands – Lord Gus O'Donnell has hinted at this – may say this is just midterm waffle. Languishing in the polls, beset by intractable problems generating intra-party strife (think Europe), the Tories would inevitably start blaming communications or civil servants.

But mud sticks and morale sinks. The history of previous Tory and Labour government tells us that ministers who slag off their officials run an advanced risk of being leaked against: Whitehall professionalism is remarkably elastic in the sense of accommodating political insults, but it has its limits.

And meanwhile, just to make this peculiar saga even weirder, Number 10 and ministers do things seemingly calculated to make their criticisms come true.

I wrote the other day about the problem of expert knowledge, and the puzzle of appointing a foreign policy man with no background in crime or domestic policy to head the Home Office. O'Donnell told Herbert civil servants are obliged to say "no minister" on the basis of their expertise and command of the evidence. If that were once true, it is a defence that decreasingly holds.

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